You love listening to your favorite tunes, podcasts, and videos on Spotify, but have you ever thought about how Spotify can support your brand marketing? Spotify can be an incredible addition to your business’ marketing strategy. In this article we break down what Spotify is and how leveraging Spotify for brands can help your business go above and beyond with your brand marketing campaigns.
What is Spotify?
Spotify is a media streaming service that was founded in 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon in Stockholm, Sweden. The service was launched and available to the public starting in 2008. Spotify listeners can engage with music, podcasts, and videos on the application. Spotify partners with music labels and independent artists on licensing deals to house the audio files and offer them as options to Spotify listeners.
Spotify offers several plans. First is the Free Plan that offers limited access to Spotify, with mandatory ads, and limited navigation options. If you’d like to have greater access, there’s the Spotify Premium plan, which costs $9.99 per month. This plan offers unlimited skips, the ability to download audio, and no advertisements. Spotify also offers special deals for students as well as Premium for Family, which allows multiple accounts to have Premium access for $14.99 per month.
How Does Spotify Work?
Spotify has created many different ways to navigate and interact with the audio you love on the platform. Upon opening the application, the navigation bar offers a large menu of options for users. The first two options allow users to search for a song, artist, album, or title using a search bar. They can also browse through curated “radio stations” based on genre, artist-inspired, etc. These categories are:
- Browse
- Radio
After the first two categories, the next batch is listed under the ‘Your Library’ division header. These categories help you easily sort through media that you’ve “Liked” (saved as one of your favorites). The Spotify category, ‘Local Files’ is also included here, which is a collection of media from your computer, or iTunes account. Here’s a full list of these categories:
- Your Daily Mix
- Recently Played
- Songs
- Albums
- Artists
- Stations
- Local Files
- Videos
- Podcasts
The final division of categories is ‘Playlists’. These are all the playlists that you have personally created, or a playlist you found on Spotify and ‘Followed’. It also includes Spotify’s ‘Discover Weekly’ category, a service that generates a unique playlist of songs for the user based on songs and artists they have ‘liked’. The full list of categories in this division will look different for each user depending on the playlists they are following.
How Spotify for Brands Can Spice Up Your Marketing Campaigns
When we suggest using Spotify in your brand marketing efforts, your first thought might be, “My brand has nothing to do with music or bands, how does this apply to me?”. While we can understand that thought process, we’d argue that music and other audio are cultural connecting factors that can apply to many businesses, regardless as to how related music is to your product or service. Adding positively to your customer’s lifestyle and experience will help keep your brand front-of-mind. Read on to discover game-changing marketing tactics using Spotify for brands.
Create Spotify Brand Marketing Playlists
Brands should consider creating a themed brand marketing playlist on Spotify to add a bit of fun and diversity to their business’ content creation efforts. When creating the playlist it’s important to think about your brand voice. What type of musical genres and moods fit the tone of your brand? Which artists and song messages would you want your brand to be connected with in the minds of listeners? Is there a current campaign going on that you could incorporate these playlists into? The activity of creating a brand marketing playlist can be a creative way to explore deeper what your brand represents and the emotions you’d like prospective customers to experience when they engage with you. Here are a few ideas of reasons and events to tie a brand marketing playlist:
- Seasonal Shifts & Holidays: Everyone gets excited about the holidays! Help make your customer’s celebrations easier and more enjoyable with seasonal and holiday inspired playlists that have your brand’s signature style attached.
- Brick & Mortar Store Theme Music: Does the music you play at your brick and mortar store get frequent compliments? Open up that playlist to the public and let customers know about it!
- New Product Lines: Have a new line of products or services about to launch? Consider creating a playlist around their theme to help clients celebrate (and encourage them to indulge in a purchase or two!).
- Charitable Partnerships: To support your brand’s announcement of charitable partnerships, consider creating a brand marketing playlist filled with feel-good tunes that relate to the charity.
- Employee Picks: If your business is centered around personal branding and personality, a Spotify playlist is a great way to help your followers connect with you- and take a peek into your favorite tunes for the gym, relaxing afternoons, or parties!
Brands Can Leverage the Power of Podcasts
Podcasting has become a staple of the streaming world, and many folks have built entire businesses around podcasts! But whether you are familiar with podcasts or not, there are several ways to engage with podcasts for stellar brand marketing opportunities.
The first option? Create your own podcast! Many brands that aren’t innately related to the music or entertainment industries have launched podcasts with great success. Having a branded podcast expands the ways in which potential customers can find and engage with you, and these days there are podcasts on virtually every subject and in any niche you can think of! Brands like McDonald’s, GE, Sephora, Microsoft, Zip Recruiter, and Johnson & Johnson are all great examples of surprising brands who have used podcasting in their brand marketing strategies.
If you aren’t ready to dive in with your own podcast, another option is to be a guest on other popular podcasts. Do some research on podcasts that focus on a related subject to your brand – or even ones that are more generic and cover business and entrepreneurship! Being a guest on a podcast is a great way to expand your reach to new potential customers and promote your product or service. Make sure you understand each podcast’s format and style before reaching out to them. Once you’ve created a list of podcasts you’d like to pitch yourself to, be sure to send them a short bio as well as a few topics you’d feel passionate speaking about that would be relevant to their show.
Market Your Brand With Paid Spotify Advertising
The third way brands can use Spotify as part of their brand marketing efforts is to engage with paid Spotify advertising. While you may already be utilizing Google Ads to promote your website or traditional advertising like commercials or billboards, Spotify ads are a fresh way for brands to get their message out. There are a few ad options to consider on Spotify. The first is signing up to be an advertising partner with Spotify. These adverts are displayed to users with Free accounts. Another option is connecting with podcasts that are related to your brand’s niche and having an ad featured in episodes of the show. This ad will often remain in the podcast episode forever, unlike rotating ads that cycle through on the Free Spotify plans.
Publicizing Your Spotify Presence
So you’ve jumped in and selected one or more ways to add Spotify to your brand marketing strategy. Congratulations! The next step is making sure that your existing customer base knows you now have a Spotify presence so that they can engage, and hopefully share with their friends as well.
- Social Media: Each of the Spotify brand marketing strategies we’ve explained are excellent opportunities to create promotional content for social media. Share a graphic with a link to the Spotify content via social media, and maybe even pull a snippet of the audio to share as a video to give followers a teaser!
- In-Store: If your brand has a brick and mortar store, create a sign or fliers to distribute to guests who walk in.
- Email: If you’ve developed a strong email list, consider creating a special email message to get the word out about your Spotify playlist or podcast episode, too!
Now that you’ve mastered Spotify, are you looking to tackle SoundCloud next? We’ve got you covered with our guide to SoundCloud marketing.
